A global, high-resolution (30-m) inland water body dataset for 2000: first results of a topographic–spectral classification algorithm

Abstract

The science and management of terrestrial ecosystems require accurate, high-resolution mapping of surface water. We produced a global, 30-m-resolution inland surface water dataset with an automated algorithm using Landsat-based surface reflectance estimates, multispectral water and vegetation indices, terrain metrics, and prior coarse-resolution water masks. The dataset identified 3,650,723 km 2 of inland water globally -nearly three quarters of which was located in North America (40.65%) and Asia (32.77%), followed by Europe (9.64%), Africa (8.47%), South America (6.91%), and Oceania (1.57%). Boreal forests contained the largest portion of terrestrial surface water (25.03% of the global total), followed by the nominal 'inland water' biome (16.36%), tundra (15.67%), and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests (13.91%). Agreement with respect to the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer water mask and Landsat-based national land-cover datasets was very high, with commission errors <4% and omission errors <14% relative to each. Most of these were accounted for in the seasonality of water cover, snow and ice, and clouds -effects which were compounded by differences in image acquisition date relative to reference datasets. The Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) inland surface water dataset is available for open access at the GLCF website (http://www.landcover.org).

Multi-Decadal Surface Water Dynamics in North American Tundra

“…Inland water accounts for between 10% and 20% of the continental surface in northern Canada depending on the source of the water map [22,23,26]. Previous work focused on the abundance [2,22] and importance of small water bodies [32] both globally and in the Arctic.…”

“…Each of these products has represented an advance in the mapping capabilities but also still has significant limitations including spatial resolution [22][23][24], temporal resolution [25,26] or both [27]. Most recently, work has been done to generate continental scale maps of surface water extent at the decadal time step using a time series of Landsat data as input [28,29].…”

PeRL: a circum-Arctic Permafrost Region Pond and Lake database

“…Currently, however, the direction and magnitude of these changes remain uncertain, mainly due to the limited extent of high-resolution studies and the lack of pond representation in global databases. Although recent efforts have produced global land cover maps with resolutions of 30 m (Liao et al, 2014;Verpoorter et al, 2014;Feng et al, 2015;Paltan et al, 2015), these data sets only include lakes.…”

Remote Sensing of Storage Fluctuations of Poorly Gauged Reservoirs and State Space Model (SSM)-Based Estimation

“…It computes the change in volume at each time step with the change in the elevation and area of the truncated inverted pyramid with respect to the previous time step. The cumulative summation of each time step volume change derived from the trapezoidal volume formula is given in Equation (1).…”

“…On a global scale, relatively few water bodies are regularly monitored by traditional in situ measurements. In the last few decades, satellite remote sensing has evolved as a promising alternative for regular global monitoring of water resources [1][2][3]. Satellite altimetry is now a well-established tool for inland water level estimation [4][5][6][7] and Landsat, with its long archive, free availability and relatively high-resolution database, delivers one of the most frequently used remote sensing data sets [8][9][10][11].…”